


It Hurt Itself in Its Confusion!

by orphan_account



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pokemon Fusion, Getting Together, Happy Ending, M/M, Newmann Secret santa, nary a genital mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:41:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28564533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “You know, dude,” Newt said, “just because you dress like the ghost of a Victorian child doesn’t mean you have to specialize in ghost-type pokémon.”Polteagiest stared him down as they slowly pulled themself along the ground with their spectral arms, their little haunted teapot clinking and clattering across the uneven stone. They didn’t have to drag themself. Newt knew they could float, he’d seen them do it. He was pretty sure they even had feet. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were messing with him.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	It Hurt Itself in Its Confusion!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zakodia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zakodia/gifts).



> I cannot believe the audacity I have to show up a week late with a Pokémon au, but the thing is!! You said!! 'Any kind of AU is great, the weirder or more out there the better honestly' and I had a lot of fun writing this. I seriously hope you enjoy it!
> 
> (I did play a little fast and loose with various bits of Pokémon canon, but this is just a story to read for fun. So, um, au all around?)

Newt would never have given the kid a pokémon in the first place if he hadn’t thought she could handle it.

Did he stop to think about the myriad possible consequences of an unsupervised teenager set loose in the region with little more than a Pikachu, a dream, and rare piece of scientific technology that she would hopefully take great care of and use to collect high-quality data? Maybe not. That’s his bad.

Did Newt pause to consider the potential effect of him waxing poetic over a table of fossils about the rumors of a pokémon so ancient and so powerful that the idea of finding it and catching it would be, and feel free to quote him on this, _‘the raddest thing to happen to the modern study of pokémon in like a bajillion years,_ _Miss Mori_ _’_? Unfortunately not. Again, that one’s on him.

This, though? This is not his fault. Not completely.

Newt’s week had started with a bang.

“Professor Geiszler!”

The door to Newt’s private workroom swung inwards and hit the wall so hard that the shelved glassware rattled in the cabinets.

“Professor, there’s--! Oh, are you sleeping?”

Newt startled awake with a snort.

“Nope,” he lied groggily.

He hurriedly pushed up his glasses and blinked at the black tabletop in front of him. There were handful of scattered papers and a thankfully stoppered vial of Zubat venom sitting on it next to a short stack of depression slides. He’d fallen asleep at his desk again last night.

Hovering in the doorway, his assistant, Iggy, wasn’t phased.

“There’s a challenger at the gym!” Iggy barreled on. “They made it through the Laboratory past every trainer!” Iggy beamed at him. “Professor, you’re up!”

The stadiums in Galar were enormous. They had to be to support battles between the region’s Gigantamaxed pokémon and the sheer size of the crowds that such a spectacle drew. It had already been four months, but Newt had a feeling that walking into the battle arena as the leader of his own gym would never fail to make him feel like a fucking rock star.

In a recent guest interview with TV Mauville, Newt had been asked to describe the ‘Top Three Best  
Things About Being a New Gym Leader in the Galar Region’. Coming in at number three had been the outfit.

Black jeans and combat boots weren’t new to Newt and frankly weren’t exciting enough for a gym leader who people had started calling the _Poison Professor_ _._ That’s why, over a button-down shirt and skinny tie, Newt finished the look off with his pièce de résistance: a custom designed, holographic-sequined lab coat.

Was he getting too old to wear stuff like this? Chill of you to ask, but no. He pretty much looked cool the whole time and that wasn’t just his opinion. He had merch. Besides, without a bold look he’d never be able to get away with his second favorite thing: the dramatic one-liners.

Now, not every battle deserved a one-liner. That, in Newt’s opinion, was key. Newt had struggled his whole life with knowing when to be obnoxious on purpose and when to keep his mouth shut, but only recently was he starting to get the hang of it. The operant conditioning inherent the stadium atmosphere was just too strong to resist.

For example, try to say something cool right before you get your ass handed to you by a trainer who really knows their stuff? Unbelievably embarrassing. Bust one out seconds before you wipe the floor with some poor kid who clearly made it this far on luck alone? Now you look like a real asshole, and the witnesses are in the thousands.

The one-liners were best saved for the good battles, the even match ups that filled the whole stadium with a tension that thrummed like raw electricity. The battles like today.

Newt hadn’t been completely honest when he’d given TV Mauville his number one answer. _“_ _The enthusiasm of the crowd!”_ He’d said. _“Seriously man, I’ve never been a part of anything so cool and just, like,_ _inclusive._ _Doesn’t matter who’s winning. That crowd_ _has your back_ _. They just wanna see a_ _great_ _match.”_

Newt stared out into the rows and rows of people cheering and chanting along with the music blasting through the stadium speakers. It had been a good answer, but, yeah... not super true. His actual favorite thing about being a gym leader in Galar, his favorite thing about the crowd, was that he could look out into that dense, uproarious mass at any point mid-battle and have no way of knowing whether or not Hermann Gottlieb was in it.

Newt liked to pretend he was.

After a pause, Newt grinned and pushed his glasses up with a finger. It was time for some pageantry. He struck a pose that activated the Dynamax Band on his wrist.

“This has been fun,” Newt said, earset mic projecting his voice over the sudden eruption of excited screams, “but it looks like it’s time for the _Poison Professor_ to really show you what these kaiju… can do!”

The sky began to swirl with a dark purple haze and the ground rumbled as Toxtricity morphed into their Gigantamax form.

Hermann probably wouldn’t have thought it was that cool.

Speaking of things Hermann wouldn’t have thought were cool, Newt was also in a cover band.

“What’s up, Hammerlocke!” Newt screeched into the mic. One song in and he was sweating already, amped up and still riding the high of the successful gym battle that afternoon. “You already know it, but we’re _Team Rock It_ and we hope you’re ready to roll!”

Newt’s on-stage one-liners needed more work.

The band had been doing a circuit of smaller venues across Galar for a couple months now, but this pub was Newt’s favorite. The walls were rough old stone and the lighting was low and golden. It wasn’t exactly where the cool kids wanted to be, but Newt flattered himself that they’d drawn a decent crowd each time they’d played there so far.

Unlike his hobby of gazing into the crowd and daydreaming at the stadium, Newt never imagined Hermann here at the Pub. There were a number of reasons.

First, Newt was pretty sure Hermann hated music. He didn’t have a wealth of information to back up that claim, it just felt right. Secondly, Hermann definitely didn’t seem like the type to go to a pub for a pint. Newt had clocked a bottle of Snover gin in his desk drawer once, but he’d never seen him pour himself a glass let alone go out on the town. Third and foremost, this place was pretty intimate. It was almost too intimate for a rock show, actually. That’s why Newt liked it.

Performing at the Pub was the antithesis of performing at the stadium. Newt could stand on stage and look every patron in the face if he wanted. It would be creepy, but he could totally acknowledge everyone here individually if he chose to. Therefore, it was stupid to imagine that Hermann was here because if he were, Newt would see him.

In fact, if Hermann were here, he’d look a lot like the guy with the bad haircut sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room glowering at Newt.

Like, a _lot_ lot like that guy. Even the tweed looked familiar. Newt narrowed his eyes.

“ _Hermann?_ ” He squeaked into the mic.

Hermann rolled his eyes.

Newt didn’t have any choice but to stumble off stage and straight to Hermann’s table as soon as the show was over. “What are you doing here?”

Hermann didn’t waste any time.

“You and I need to have a chat,” he said and cast a disdainful glance around the bar. “Someplace quiet.”

There weren’t many quiet places to be found in a place like this. Newt nearly swallowed his own tongue thinking about pulling Hermann with him into the graffitied single-stall bathroom in the back, so that was obviously out.

“Uh, well. C’mon,” he said and bustled Hermann backstage instead, willing the weird blush off of his face.

‘Backstage’ was just a re-purposed break room outfitted with an old couch, a coffee pot, and currently, an assortment of musical equipment.

“So, what’s up?”

For a moment, Hermann just looked at him, so Newt looked back.

It was funny to think of the last time they’d seen each other as significant when they’d only shared a lab for two months. Especially considering that for years leading up to that disastrous official working relationship, their unofficial working communications had been the best part of Newt’s day, everyday. Gym battles were exhilarating, but nothing matched the high Newt had felt when he was out in the field in the wilds of Unova and heard the chime of a received communication from Hermann.

Then they finally met and Hermann turned out to be not only annoyingly hot in that stuffy professor way, but also a genuinely annoying stuffy professor. That actually hadn’t been a problem for Newt, but Newt had clearly been a huge problem for Hermann, so. Anyway. Crush obliterated.

They’d been staring at each other for too long at this point, so Newt needed to be a dick about it. He raised his eyebrows.

“What’s this about?”

Hermann scowled.

“It’s ‘about’ your last hoorah as Professor in Residence,” Hermann said tightly. His irritation was plainly obvious, but something about the little crease between his eyebrows betrayed his worry.

Newt frowned. He thought back to those final days before he left for Galar after accepting the gym leader position. There was very little he would have considered a ‘last hoorah’, unless Hermann meant… Newt’s eyebrows shot up.

“Mako Mori? Is she okay?”

“We received a message at the lab last month, presumably for you,” Hermann said evasively. He took out his Rotom Phone and pulled up a video. He held it out to Newt and Newt took it and pressed play.

Mako smiled up at him from the screen. She was thick in the jungle somewhere, potentially the Alola region judging by the flora Newt could see.

“Professor, you won’t believe it. I’ve found it! I know where it is, right where you said, and we’re going to go catch it!” She seemed to look past her phone to smile at someone out of frame before turning back to the screen. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know. See you soon, Professor!”

The screen went black and Newt felt speechless, mind racing.

“The legendary, um--?” He cleared his throat. “Did she find it?”

The answering look on Hermann’s face landed in his stomach like a ball of lead.

“I’ve been monitoring her progress these past few weeks as a matter of data collection,” he said quietly. “Her GPS signal hasn’t updated in,” he glanced at the clock on the wall, “over 12 hours.”

Newt swallowed.

“So,” Hermann continued. “What’s the location you cited in your hypothesis? I’m going after her.”

That took a moment to settle in before Newt barked a laugh.

“Dude, what? You don’t know the first thing about fieldwork.” Newt came to the quickest conclusion of his life. “Nah, send me her last location. I’ll go. I’m the one who sent her after it in the first place.”

Hermann, face going red as a tomato, snatched the Rotom Phone out of Newt’s hands.

“You’ll excuse me if I don’t trust your judgment, given the circumstances,” he snapped.

“The _circumstances_? What-- Listen, she’s my student--”

“ _Your_ student? So, _you’ve_ been advising her all this time, have you?”

“Who gave her the pokémon, huh? Who told her to get out there, you know, and like--” Newt gestured vaguely with his arms.

“Ah, I see, the way of a true mentor,” Hermann scoffed.

Newt gawped at him.

“Hermann, like, this isn’t a discussion. Just chill out and--”

“She’s as much my student as she is yours!” Hermann shouted. He paused, then awkwardly released the death grip he seemed to just notice he had on his cane. “More so these past months if you’ll deign to believe it,” he added, quieter.

Newt took a mental step back and really looked at him. It had been such a gut-punch to look him in the face earlier that he hadn’t noticed the dark circles under his eyes or the tension in the set of his shoulders. He was Hermann, so of course Newt had initially thought he looked great. Now Newt could see that he looked great _and_ tired.

Newt shoved his hands in his pockets.

“You’re right, dude. We’ll both go.”

Hermann had started to deflate at ‘you’re right’ but puffed right back up at ‘both’.

“Unnecessary,” he said. “Just give me the location and I’ll use that to--”

Newt rolled his eyes so hard that his teenage self would have given him a standing ovation.

“ _Ugh._ Hermann. Listen up,” Newt held up a placating hand as Hermann opened his mouth to argue. “I’m going. I’m sorry, man. There’s just no version of this where I let you go out there into danger alone.”

Newt could stand the idea of Hermann puttering away at his equations in a lab halfway across the world, cursing Newt’s name. He couldn’t stand the idea of him lost in the fucking Alolan wilderness by himself.

“Why?” Hermann asked a touch plaintively. He looked almost flushed.

“Because,” Newt floundered. “We, uh. Well, we’re friends. Right? I mean, we were.”

Traveling with Hermann was a learning experience, but it’s not like Newt was always easy to hang around either. So, if either of them had had ‘traveling together’ listed on their bingo card as the reason this whole thing went to shit, they’d be taking a big L on this one.

As soon as they’d made it to Alola they’d been able to get a live location on Mako again, so that wasn’t the problem either. It wasn’t moving fast or far, but it was moving and, relatively speaking, it’d been no trouble at all to follow her signal to the entrance of a little-known cave system and venture inside together to start their search.

If they had really wanted to guess when things would start to look bleak, they would have had to have both ‘Team Magma for some reason’ and ‘seriously, a huge rockslide’ marked down; i.e. this is not Newt’s fault.

From their little corner of the cave, Newt and Hermann could hear the sounds of battle growing consistently quieter as the evening carried on and Mako presumably traveled deeper into the natural maze of rock carved into the side of the mountain.

“I’m afraid we’ll lose her signal soon,” Hermann muttered. “It’s growing weaker.”

He was sitting on the ground, leg outstretched, staring down at his Rotom Phone. Newt could see the blue dot that was Mako reflected in his weird little glasses, pinging along the unknown corridors below. They’d sent her a message after the rockslide, but had yet to receive any communication back.

Newt pressed his hand flat against one of the boulders that had trapped them and sighed. He could feel the stones trembling faintly alongside the noises below. In the commotion seconds before disaster, they’d lost most of their things at the mouth of the cavern.

“This is so embarrassing,” Newt said.

“What is?” Hermann asked without sparing him a glance.

Newt pressed his face up against a crack between the rocks and gazed longingly in the direction of the bag he’d dropped. The bag with his pokémon, and his food, and anything else even vaguely useful. He pulled away and sighed again. That said, they weren’t completely alone.

As the ground was lurching and the rocks were falling, Hermann had managed to grab a single pokéball. Newt should have been grateful.

“You know, dude,” Newt said, “just because you dress like the ghost of a Victorian child doesn’t mean you have to specialize in ghost-type pokémon.”

Polteageist stared him down as they slowly pulled themself along the ground with their spectral arms, their little haunted teapot clinking and clattering across the uneven stone. They didn’t have to drag themself. Newt knew they could float, he’d seen them do it. He was pretty sure they even had feet. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were messing with him.

“That’s quite enough,” Hermann grouched, but he wasn’t talking to Newt. He gently scooped Polteageist up from the ground and onto his lap. He pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and began to peevishly swipe away the grit from the side of the teapot.

“I don’t specialize in them,” he said with a scowl.

There had been a long enough pause that it took Newt a beat to catch up.

“Ghosts,” Hermann continued, sensing his lost train of thought. “I only have the one.”

He handed Polteageist the lid of their teapot. Polteageist took it and let it fall into place with a tinkle of ceramic as they ducked back down into the belly of the vessel. Herman set it aside.

“Gotcha,” Newt said.

Polteageist had cast Will-o-Wisp on the odd assortment of leaves and branches they’d been able to scrounge up from their section of cave and push into a pile. The soft blue-violet light was hardly enough in the darkness.

Being trapped was making Newt feel itchy.

“How’d you like being home?” He asked.

“Excuse me?” Hermann didn’t look up. He was fiddling with settings on the Rotom Phone.

“Galar. I thought, uh. Didn’t you grow up there?”

Hermann did glance up at that, then looked away.

“Ah, yes. Well,” he said wryly. “There were fewer billboards covered in your face back then.”

Without warning, the stress of the day sort of burst out of Newt, as if Hermann’s words had punctured a can and unfortunately the can was full of Newt’s carbonated personal anxieties.

“Is that why you were such an ass to me?” Newt blurted, “You didn’t want to look at my ugly face anymore?”

And to think he’d been embarrassed before.

“What?” Hermann asked. His eyes were hauntingly pretty in the strange, cool firelight and now was the worst time to be noticing.

“Oof, sorry. Nevermind. That was shitty,” Newt winced. “You don’t have to explain why you don’t wanna be around me, dude.”

Hermann took off his glasses somewhat dramatically and leveled Newt with a glare.

“Newton,” he started, but his tone gave Newt the emotional heebie jeebies and Newt had to keep talking.

“No, seriously, please. I get it.” Newt’s leg was jiggling now of its own free will, but he didn’t mind. “Actually I should probably apologise. I didn’t mean to come on so strong. When, uh, when we met. In person.”

“Newton?” Hermann beckoned him to sit, so he did. Unfortunately, he didn’t beckon him to shut up.

“I just, like, I had a huge crush on you,” Newt explained. “So, I dialed the annoying up to eleven I guess.” He chewed at his bottom lip.

There was a short pause that felt like an eternity wherein the only sounds came from Polteagiest rattling menacingly in their teapot between them. Hermann finally broke the silence.

“Newton,” he said. “You’re the one who didn’t like me.”

“What?”

“Newton. You rejected me. Very clearly.”

There was a roaring in Newt’s ears, and that’s probably why he was mishearing everything.

“That isn’t true. That can’t be true,” he said.

Hermann pursed his lips.

“You don’t even remember.”

Newton’s mouth fell open.

“When? How?”

Hermann took the dirty handkerchief he’d used to clean Polteageist’s teapot back out of his pocket and pretended to clean his glasses with it, even though the visibility in this light was nil regardless. He put them on.

“I gave you an Applin,” he said.

After a moment, Hermann took his glasses back off and swiped away at the left lens some more.

“Of course you’re aware that Applin is a symbol of--” Hermann cut himself off. Closed his eyes. Opened them. He put his glasses back on. “Do you even still have her?”

“Bad Bake,” Newt said faintly. “Of course I still have her, you gave her to me.”

“You named her _Bad Bake_?” Hermann asked, appalled.

“She’s an Appletun now. I take her everywhere with me.” Newt pointed vaguely in the direction of his backpack. “That was a confession? Of like, love?”

“This is mortifying,” Hermann said, but Newt found he was grinning so hard that his face hurt.

“You like me? You like, care about me?” He asked.

The pissy look on Hermann’s face told him everything.

“Oh my God, dude! This is--! I mean, we have to have an adult conversation about this, huh?”

Hermann opened his mouth to reply, but before he could, the Rotom Phone in his hand started to chime.

“It’s Miss Mori,” he said.

“Answer it!” Newt said and then leaned over to press the button himself.

“Professors!” Mako grinned breathlessly into the camera. “Professors, can you hear me?”

“We can!”

“Oh, good. I got your message!” Mako said. “We’re coming to rescue you.”

“Who’s with you?” Hermann asked.

Mako didn’t seem to hear him. She held up a pokéball clenched in a hand that trembled slightly from exhaustion. Newt gasped.

“Is that?” He asked.

“Can you believe it?” She said.

“You caught it?” Newt squeaked.

“I did! I caught it!”

Her grin suddenly broke into a yawn that ended as a tired laugh.

“Okay, we’re on our way to your location with an escape rope. Let’s get out of here.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Newt asked, but the call had already cut.

The two of them stared down at the screen.

“I can’t believe we thought our old assess were coming to rescue _her_ ,” Newt said.

“A frankly worrying display of hubris,” Hermann agreed.

After that, something like a horrific mutual bashfulness began to fill the space between them the longer they sat waiting in the quiet. Before he could suffocate, Newt started talking again.

“It’s gonna be pretty late when we get home. You wanna crash at my place? No, uh, no funny business,” Newt tried to joke. “Or, I mean, I guess you probably have a hotel booked--”

In the near-dark, Hermann reached over and placed his hand on top of Newt’s.

“Thank you, Newton. I’d love to.”

Silently, Polteageist fumed.


End file.
